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was Ripley's eccentric friend, Thoreau, who said he had found, south on Cape Cod, farther down than the trains ran, a sandy paradise, permeated by the sea, stranger than much of Europe, and inhabited by men who resembled old sails come to life, women with profiles like sharp W ' s. 'You stand there on the Cape.' Mr. Thoreau had said, 'and put all America behind you.' The idea of a walking trip upon the Cape with a female companion seemed to the philosophical recluse an idle venture. Much better, he thought, make the trip alone, and then return to Boston and matrimony. Why marry first and drag a woman over the dunes? But it was on this latter course Ripley decided. He had seen his Lanice on Bodmin and knew that its solitary strangeness would delight her.

'I never knew a woman yet,' said Thoreau, 'who would eat a bad breakfast and get sand in her shoes merely for a sight of the grandeurs of nature. And when on the Cape you will have eels and beans and doughnuts and tea three times a day.'

'But we intend to go.'

Thoreau looked pityingly on this intelligent man whom he believed love had demented and shrugged his spare shoulders. But he willingly laid out an itin-